BNP men planned bombs for 'race war'

Two British National party members plotted to make bombs in readiness for a "civil war between races", a court was told yesterday.

A former candidate for the party stashed boxes of chemicals at his home after buying them online at the instruction of a local dentist and fellow BNP member, jurors at Manchester crown court heard.

However, the hoard amassed by Robert Cottage, 49, of Colne, Lancashire, came to light when his wife told her social worker she was scared that Cottage and 62-year-old David Jackson were planning to test chemical weapons in the local countryside.

"He had just lost the plot - he just started acting really strange," Kerena Cottage, 29, told the court via videolink. "What he was saying - it sounded to me as if he was delusional."

Prosecutor Louise Blackwell QC told the jury Cottage had emailed orders for the chemicals, which could be combined to make crude bombs, in September 2006.

Four months earlier, he had tried to win a seat on Colne council for the second time.

Ms Cottage said her husband had been very enthusiastic in the BNP, rising through the party's ranks during three years as a member and becoming a friend of its leader, Nick Griffin.

Alarm bells began to ring when Cottage led her to understand that the chemicals were intended to harm the government or anyone who came unannounced to their home.

"Our relationship before the BNP, it was brilliant," she said. However, she added that Cottage had become "really radical" and their marriage was ruined.

"He thinks there's a war going to happen with the culture, the Asian culture and the white culture and that Tony Blair and President Bush are scheming against people," she said.

Ms Cottage added that her husband and Jackson were "solid" friends who met regularly to chat about politics, the BNP and Hitler.

Police found guides to making bombs at the Cottages' home, along with ball-bearing BB guns, gas masks, body armour and stab-proof vests.

Cottage's mother, Barbara Cottage, told the jury her son's stockpiling of weapons was only for self-defence. "It was because he was afraid that his house or his family might be attacked," she said. "It was not to go out and attack anybody but because he might be attacked."

Cottage admitted possessing explosives at the pair's first trial in February, when a jury failed to reach a verdict on the more serious charge of conspiring to cause explosions intended to endanger life. He and Jackson deny this for the second time.